In an organization such as a large corporation or other enterprise, it is common to want to apply a global policy to the organization's resources, including to its data. By way of example, an organization may wish to set an expiration policy (e.g., three years) for application data that has not been modified within that timeframe so as to have such data archived or deleted.
However, due to various circumstances, individual computing machines may be subject to different policy needs, and as a result, defining a global policy for resource management on a set of computers is difficult. For example, a policy that may apply to all of the folders on one machine may only apply to one folder on another machine. A more particular example of one such policy may be to enable a “legal hold” where some folders on a set of machines cannot be modified due to pending litigation; thus, the example three-year global expiration policy described above cannot apply to that particular set of folders on these machines. Heretofore there was no straightforward way to apply policies on a global (e.g., enterprise-wide) basis yet account for different policy needs.
As a result, administrators are often forced to define resource management policies on each computing machine individually. Alternatively, administrators may need to standardize machines to some extent (e.g., all machines have to have folders with certain names) so they can deploy the same policy on the specific set of resources that need to exist on each machine. Each of these alternatives is very limiting and tends to result in administrators abandoning or significantly restricting their efforts to define global policy.